


Shall Soon be Deceased

by Rouge_Angle



Series: Dracula's Daughter [2]
Category: Hellsing
Genre: At Least That's What I'm Aiming For, Gen, POV Female Character, Seras-centric, mixed bag of genres much like the manga itself is, the pairing tag will be more of a pre-ship thing when it shows up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-10-31 03:32:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17841644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rouge_Angle/pseuds/Rouge_Angle
Summary: A series of oneshots following on from my other fic 'What Once Was Alive', that focus on Seras and her relationships with the rest of the main cast. Because Seras deserves more.Chapter 1: ‘It takes Seras longer than it should to figure out that he’s Dracula.’Chapter 2: Seras, Alucard, and the aftermath of the Valentine brothers' attack.ON HIATUS





	1. It's a semordnilap, Seras

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes Seras longer than it should to figure out that he's Dracula.

It takes Seras longer than it should to figure out that he's Dracula _._ Bit embarrassing really.

Before she dies on that moonlit night, Dracula is a word she only associates with cheap Halloween costumes and old black-and-white horror films. She's never been bookish; when she was a little girl, she liked the kind of fun that involved climbing trees and being better at football than the boys when they let her play with them (and beating them up when they hadn't). When she was older and off-duty and there was nothing on the telly, she _did_ read - romance novels mostly, even if the whole concept of blokes and relationships with blokes was one she kept at arm's length. Books written by old Victorians weren't the sort of thing she'd have been interested in reading. And once that night is over she's too busy dealing with the fact that vampires _are real_ and that she _is one_ to be thinking much about fiction.

But then they all keep calling her that word: _draculina_. They’ve all done it at some point: Master, Sir Integra, Walter – even that priest Anderson who stuck her full of silver knives. (That had hurt more than she had known she could feel hurt, until she’d watched Alucard’s head come off.) _Draculina_.

She’s tried not to ask Alucard too many questions about every little thing. It’s not that she doesn’t want to know, but maybe that she doesn’t want to be irritating. He does get annoyed with her quite easily. Or maybe that she’s scared of what some of the answers might be. But now, leaning against the wall of the kitchen while Walter gathers Sir Integra’s lunch onto a tray to take up to her office, she thinks this is something harmless enough. She waits for Walter to finish, eyeing the tray wistfully. The tea in the china pot isn’t English breakfast; she can smell a faint trace of something that might be oranges. The fact that she can smell it from across the room even beneath the rich savoury aromas of the food is yet another of the hundreds of small daily reminders that she’s not normal anymore.

Seras sighs. She misses food.

Walter glances over at her as he makes his way to the door, raising an eyebrow at the sight of her. Not for the first time, she wonders how his monocle stays in place. “Miss Victoria,” he says, as if discovering her there is an unexpected but pleasant surprise and that he’d been totally unaware of a vampire coming into the room to loiter behind him. (She doesn’t believe that for a second.) “You’re up unusually early today. Is everything alright?”

Seras smiles tiredly, and tries not to think about how bone-weary she feels. “It’s overcast enough today. I couldn’t sleep, so I thought getting up for a while would help.” She moves and pushes the door open wider for him. Walter carries the laden tray past her and towards the stairs that rise to the ground floor with not even a rattle of china.

“I find a walk in the grounds and a cup of warm milk are great remedies for insomnia, though I suppose neither is appropriate for you.” He glances up at a high window, revealing grey bleak English weather, but definitely daylight.  “Is there anything I can do?”

“Not really. I’ve just been wondering about silly things since I can’t get to sleep.” She climbs the main staircase alongside him, slowing her steps to stay beside him even though he’s walking briskly. She lets a beige glove skim along the polished wooden surface of the banister. “If I’m a Draculina,” she says, giving him a sidelong glance, “are boy vampires called Draculas?”

“Draculs, actually,” Walter replies without missing a beat, though he does look faintly amused by her useage of the term ‘ _boy_ vampires.’ “Though to be technically correct only vampires of your particular bloodline would be called either. Unfortunately, Alucard was quite…prolific…back in the day, so one was more likely to run into a Draculina than not, and the term became somewhat generalised. Of course this is us speaking of the true undead, and not these cheap freaks we’ve been plagued with of late. And vampires with any real pedigree are rare to encounter these days…Miss?” He looks over his shoulder, having noticed that Seras has stopped walking and is looking at him with the same incredulity she might if he just announced Bugs Bunny is in fact a demonic entity.

“My master is…Dracula? As in… _Dracula_?” Dracula of the widow’s peak, dodgy cape and bad special affects that turn him into a puff of smoke? _That_ Dracula?

A thinly disguised snort of amusement comes from two stairs up. Walter’s mouth twitches, and the look in his eyes says he is definitely laughing _at_ her. “Spell his name backwards,” he says, and his voice has the same tone that she was used to hearing from the men in her unit, who saw her as the punchline to every dumb blonde joke until they saw her on the firing range. _Git._

Despite her annoyance, she does, and so many things fall into place.

And so do many more questions.

 

* * *

 

 

The only time she’s really allowed out of the mansion is when something that should already be dead needs killing properly. After the first time when she made a request to go back to her old flat and Sir Integra had refused, she hasn’t asked for leave again. She’s resigned herself to pacing around the rambling old house and its grounds like an animal at the zoo, a comparison that does nothing to ease her dissatisfaction. She’s been here for over two months now though, and this time, she doesn’t want to go to the place that she used to call home.

Her meeting with Sir Integra is less formal this time. Not because she’s comfortable enough to be casual with the other woman, but because opportunity places Integra out in the grounds when Seras happens to be on one of her walks. She walks unaccompanied, more marches really, straight-backed and purposeful as she follows a gravel path that leads away from the house. Seras has followed it before; it leads to a private graveyard. On seeing that, she’d left and not gone back. This time, she follows Integra. Not hiding exactly, but not going out of her way to announce herself. If Integra notices she shows no sign of it, long pale hair stirring in the night breeze.

There are four graves. Each headstone is engraved with a cross, and beneath that, the shield emblem of the Hellsing organisation. Integra passes the first two graves with little more than a slowed step and a glance in their direction, coming to rest between the third and fourth. One white glove, gleaming to Seras’ keen eyes, fishes into her blazer pocket for a cigar and her lighter. After the first slow drag, she looks round, blue eyes piercing through her glasses. “For a vampire, you’re terribly loud.”

Seras fiddles with her glove, feeling awkward and ungainly under Integra’s stare. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to – I’ll just, I’ll just go now. Sorry.” She turns around, intending to beat a hasty retreat and mentally cursing herself for stalking Sir Integra like some kind of Peeping Tom. (Or Alucard.)

“You may as well stay now that you’re here,” Integra says, voice slightly muffled as she sets her cigar back between her lips. She inhales the toxic fumes with obvious satisfaction before breathing them slowly back into the crisp night air. “It’s no big secret.”

Given permission, Seras comes closer. This time she reads the names on the stones: _Abraham van Helsing._ _Penelope van Helsing_. _Rajani Hellsing. Arthur Hellsing._

Oh.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” Seras says softly, eyes on the graves. “I’d never taken a look before, so I didn’t realise this was your family.”

“Most of it,” Integra says, smiling faintly. It’s not a particularly kind smile. “The parts that deserved to be laid to rest here.” Whatever thought gave her that dark amusement, it passes quickly and the smile slips off her face. “My grandparents,” she says, gesturing to her left at the _van Helsing_ stones. “Abraham van Helsing was the founder of the Hellsing organisation, and the first human your Master ever knelt to. Penelope was his second, much younger wife.”

“Then these ones are—?”

“My parents, yes.” Integra considers the stones in silence for a moment, cigar shrinking considerably with each breath. “You were orphaned young, weren’t you Seras?”

The question startles her when it shouldn’t; of course they would’ve run background checks on her. A familiar, ugly feeling rises up inside her at the thought of her parents and what happened to them. She squashes the memories as she’s been squashing them for years, pressing them down before she can be consciously aware of them. “Yes, Sir.”

Sir Integra nods. “Me too.” She doesn’t elaborate. Quiet builds between them, human and vampire. If she looks, Seras can see every fine, colourless hair on Integra’s cheeks and the way her pulse jumps in the vein under her jaw. Pressing together teeth that are too sharp, she very carefully does not look.

Instead, she swallows and makes herself break the silence. “I’ll have to read that book one day, if it’s all true. I thought Dracula was just made up for those old horror films you know. Like Frankenstein and the creature from the black lagoon.”

Integra laughs, but unlike with Walter, Seras doesn’t feel like she’s the one being made fun of here. It’s a surprising sound, from someone usually so stern. Without realising it, she’s laughing too.

“He _hates_ those old films,” Integra comments, pushing her glasses up to wipe away a tear of mirth with a gloved finger. “And whatever you do, never mention _Dracula Dead and Loving It_ where he can hear you unless you want to put up with him sulking and then coming up behind you for the next few days shouting ‘ _Fushta_!’”

Seras has no idea what she’s talking about, but doubles up with the giggles just the same at the thought of her master behaving like a brat. “I think I really will have to read the book. And maybe watch some of these films.”

“Oh I can lend you my copy,” Integra replies with more cheer than Seras has ever seen from her. “And I’m sure we have some of those films on video that he failed to destroy last time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had no idea the word 'semordnilap' existed before I wrote this and was trying to describe what kind of word 'Alucard = Dracula backwards' was. I was sitting there thinking "No not a palindrome, not an anagram..." before I gave up and googled.
> 
> Based on the first anime showing a picture of a lady in a sari, I use the headcanon that Integra's mum was Indian. Penelope is her entirely made-up grandmother, as I don't think Mina (who was bascically a vampire) was, the way I've seen some people portray things. And Alucard clearly has no sense of humour if he can't appreciate Dracula Dead and Loving It. Please feed me reviews if you liked!


	2. You yourself never loved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seras, Alucard, and the aftermath of the Valentine brothers' attack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hot off the press, so sorry for any mistakes.

There are eighty-seven cars for eighty-six coffins.  A black snake of limousines winds along the road seemingly without end – and without interruption. The route to the cemetery has been closed off for them, with claims of a serious smash involving an oil tanker to divert the public’s attention from what would no doubt be an astonishing sight.  

Seras rides with Sir Integra in the back of the first car. Walter is driving. The car is fitted with bulletproof glass windows that are tinted so darkly that it’s actually illegal, and outside the sky is a dull grey, the clouds like steel wool scouring pads. Even dark and fitting as the weather is, Seras’ eyes sting. She stares at her hands in her lap, her skin white as lilies against her black dress. She dabs at her eyes with the edge of one of Walter’s monogrammed handkerchiefs. She hadn’t been crying – she still isn’t – but she’s felt close to it for days, and he probably knows that. When she lowers her hand and crumples the cloth between her fingers, it is only barely spotted with damp, and her tears are clear of blood.

Across from her, Sir Integra is trying very hard not to smoke. She can tell by the way her fingers will smooth the same non-existent wrinkle out of her trousers every few minutes, or fiddle with the veil on her hat. Sir Hellsing is not a _fiddler_ , not normally. But Seras knows they’re both thinking of similar things.  Integra’s thinking of dozens of silver bullets fired into the undead brains of her own men.

Seras is thinking about the way their flesh had torn like wet tissue paper under her hands. How their cold blood had filled the air with its unholy stench and soaked through her gloves to make her fingers clammy afterwards. How she’d _enjoyed_ ripping their limbs off, shattering their skulls, and feeling their organs pop like water balloons under her power. Oh, she had enjoyed it. It was far too easy to enjoy.

Once she’d come back to herself, after Integra had pleaded with her to stop, all she’d felt was sick.

That doesn’t make it better though. She knew these men, she worked with them. Yeah, some of them could be arseholes or get a bit lairy, but that’s what you get when there’s a lot of men all working together. It was the same when she was in the police, and it’s not like she expected _soldiers_ to be saints. But for every one who looked at her like she might go berserk and bite their throat out at any minute, there was another who’d talk to her like she was just a girl they’d bumped into at the shops. She didn’t know all of them, and she didn’t know all of them equally well. Some were just a face, others were a name and a rank, while others she knew had wives and kids and would say things to her like _You’re such a nice girl, I’d never think you were a vampire._

They’d deserved to die with dignity. No, scratch that – they’d deserved to _live_.

She wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to save them. If she was powerful she could’ve just ran to their rescue right away, no need to go skulking through the air vents. Maybe if she’d just stopped being so stupid and just _drank the blood_ —

Her fingernails scratch against her dress. No, that wasn’t an option.

But even if she’d been unable to save them in time, there’s someone who could’ve. Easily. Someone who had sat down in the basement and not lifted a finger to stop the slaughter taking place upstairs. Someone who was not at the funeral even when she, young and weak and starved, found it well within her powers to walk in the daylight.

There’d been another vampire, the big brother, but she’s seen her master in the field enough times that she doesn’t think it would’ve been any real threat. He could’ve been there. He could’ve helped.

The thought won’t leave her alone. She watches the coffins be lowered into holes dug to receive the brave men who died in Hellsing’s service, and avoids looking too closely at people who are clearly the families of the deceased. She salutes with everyone else and endures the long service, even when the sun breaks through the clouds and she feels her knees trembling.

“Sunlight won’t kill you,” Alucard told her, the day after she died. He was sitting on the edge of the bed she still had at that point, giving her the ‘crash course’ in things that would do her harm so that she could avoid them. “It won’t burn you or make you go up in a puff of smoke. That’s an invention of film. But it _will_ tire you, and limit your powers. Not that you have much in the way of those at the moment,” he’d added, looking at her pointedly over the rims of his sunglasses. She’d refused to drink blood for the first time, and it was the first and only time – other than when they’d faced down Father Anderson – that he’d tried to convince her to drink.

 His lessons have always been valuable, when he chooses to give them. Teaching her to see her target with her third eye, demonstrating the physical limits of her body, explaining how to get across running water. Maybe he intends to teach another lesson today when he walks through the wall into the stone chamber that serves as her bedroom.

Seras isn’t really in the mood for learning.

“Police Girl.” He looks down from his ridiculous height at her while she squeals and quickly turns around, yellow shirt pressed against her chest.

“Master, I’m getting changed!” she protests, feeling her face flame. How it’s still possible for her to blush when she doesn’t have a heartbeat, she doesn’t know. “Can’t you just use _the door_ for once?” _I should really know better by now. Thank god I’m wearing a bra._

_I’ve never understood the appeal myself. They look awfully restrictive._

“Well – well you try running with these things without one. And _please_ don’t read my thoughts,” she grumbles. “You know I hate it.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Alucard says flatly, clearly decided on the matter. “And you have nothing I’m not familiar with. But more to the point – put your shirt on Police Girl. Then tell me why you’ve been ignoring my calls.”

Seras suppresses a wince, glad he can’t see it, and shrugs back into her shirt, buttons it quickly, and turns around. Her funeral dress is lying folded on top of her coffin, black pumps abandoned to one side. There’s no point in trying to deny that she heard him. He had to have started calling to her inside her head at least an hour ago. “I wanted to be alone.”

“Most unlike you,” he notes, eyes narrowed behind the opaque amber of his glasses. “Or is it more truthfully that you did not want _my_ company?” He tilts his head to one side, as if listening to something only he can hear. Seras sets her jaw and thinks very hard about brick walls. She’s not sure it will do anything, but it’ll make her bloody point if nothing else.

Whether it works or not, the penny drops. Alucard stiffens, posture straightening. “You’re angry with me.” He actually sounds a bit surprised.

“Yes.” She clears her throat. “I am.” He is her master, and while she spends half her time terrified of him, she spends the rest feeling a confused tangle of things that are mostly positive. And she’s never been great at confrontation. Part of her wants to shout at him, to demand to know what he thought he was doing leaving it all to her.

 _Because he believed you were capable enough to handle it._ Seras blinks, about to snap at him for reading her mind again, before she realises that the thought was definitely her own. She knows immediately that it’s true; he didn’t rush upstairs to help her and Sir Integra because he knew that they’d be fine without him. And they were.

It was only all the other Hellsing agents that weren’t.

Seras lets out a slow breath. He’s not talking, waiting for her to explain probably. “I am, but it’s not really fair of me,” she admits. “I think I’m more angry at myself to tell the truth. All those people died and I couldn’t – I couldn’t save them Master.” She blinks rapidly, annoyed at herself for getting emotional. She is not going to cry, especially not in front of him. “I’m just, I’m.” She stops herself from talking, before she babbles or worse, says something she’ll regret.

“This is about the soldiers then,” Alucard says slowly. “You think that _I_ should’ve helped them. That I should care that they’re dead.”

“Don’t you?” she asks softly. “Not even a little bit?”

“No. Not even a little bit.” Alucard smiles slightly and spreads his hands. “They were soldiers Police Girl. They swore their lives to Hellsing, and to my master. And they would’ve failed. Cut down by a piece of dog shit and his loudmouthed sidekick. If not for you and Walter…” he trails off and huffs with amusement. “Integra would’ve taken him down regardless, but an army of ghouls might have been too much for even her. If they couldn’t do their duty, then what good were they.”

By the time he finishes, Seras is staring at him, her lower lip shaking. “How can you say such a thing,” she says quietly. “They were people – their lives meant something!” She’s balled her hands into fists and is shouting, the way she couldn’t imagine herself doing just moments before.

He returns her stare levelly, not angry, just unable to comprehend what she’s feeling. As she looks at him, Seras feels her stomach sink. _Will I be like this if I live long enough? If I drink blood? Will I stop caring too?_

“Not to me,” Alucard replies simply.

Seras shakes her head, slowly. She’s so tired from getting up in the daylight to attend to the funeral, and the mansion echoes with the sound of repairs. She can’t deal with this right now, not when all she wants to do is climb into her coffin (yes, her coffin! That suffocating box she normally loathes) and cry. She backs up one step, two. And makes a mad dash for the door and up the basement stairs.

Alucard doesn’t follow her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He's out of practice at this whole parenting thing.


End file.
